Reports that a German tourist may have been eaten by cannibals in French
Polynesia are part of a widely held belief that cannibalism is still
practised in the South Pacific.

Stefan Ramin, a German on holiday with his girlfriend in French Polynesia, goes missing while hunting goats with a guide in the forest. A week later, charred human remains are found. A brutal murder? Or cannibalism?

According to sensationalist reports yesterday, prosecutors believe it was the latter. “The probability is that he was murdered by a cannibal and parts of him were eaten,” says one. The local guide is being hunted by police and soldiers. The remains are being flown to Paris for DNA analysis.

It seems an unlikely theory. “It’s true that French Polynesia once had something of a reputation for cannibalism, but that was a long time ago,” says John Gimlette, the travel writer. “In 1910, the American anthropologist, A P Rice, described how the people of the Marquesas Islands ritualistically killed their captives.

"First, they broke their legs, to stop them running away, then they broke their arms, to stop them resisting. This was an unhurried killing, because the Marquesans enjoyed observing their victim contemplating his fate. Eventually, the man would be skewered and roasted.”

Such rituals have passed into Pacific mythology. But, in South America, the practice appears to have endured into at least the second half of the 20th century.

“In 2000, I visited a tribe called the Ache in central Paraguay,” says Gimlette, author of Wild Coast: Travels on South America’s Untamed Edge. “I asked their warden if they still practised cannibalism. 'Not for the past 20 years,’ he said, 'although they still think about it all the time.’”

Anthropologists distinguish between survival cannibalism and ritual cannibalism, endocannibalism (the eating of one’s own dead) and exocannibalism (the killing of outsiders). Survival cannibalism can be traced back to prehistoric times. A two-million-year-old cranium was once found with cut marks, suggesting that the flesh was carefully peeled away from the skull.

Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, observed two types of cannibalism in Asia: the reverential eating of one’s own dead and the triumphant demolition of one’s enemies. It wasn’t, however, until Christopher Columbus’s expeditions in the late 1400s that the term became widely known. His report on the flesh-eating “Caribs” tribe in the West Indies appears to have been misinterpreted as “Canibs”, hence “cannibals”.

The most bloodthirsty of the early known cannibals were the pre-Columbus Aztecs in Mexico, whose high priest used to flay their prisoners of war one by one, holding the beating heart aloft for the crowds.

Other cannibals were more restrained. Fijian warriors ate their enemies as a mark of respect. Endocannibals, such as the tribes of Papua New Guinea, believed that by eating the hearts and brains of their family and friends, they would take on their desirable qualities.

In 1979, William Arens, an American anthropologist, decided that this was all nonsense. In his book, The Man-Eating Myth, he maintained that ritual cannibalism was an Imperial lie, a propaganda tool to help tame the ignoble savage. This view held sway until fresh anthropological and molecular biological research, including the study of ancient faeces, discovered that pretty much all of us had been cannibals once.

Cannibalism has certainly remained prevalent as tool of war in the past 15 years, including allegations against Congolese rebels, Indonesian tribes and Liberian rebels. And humans have always been prepared to eat one another in extremis: whether the crash-landed Uruguayan rugby team made famous by the film Alive or the emaciated citizens in the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War.

What this latest story about cannibalism reveals is our abiding interest in a topic that fascinates and repulses in equal measure. Today, the only active endocannibals are thought to be the Korowai tribe in Papua New Guinea.

Numbering around 3,000, they were unaware of the outside world until 1970. Unverified rumours exist of them eating the brain immediately after death, while it is still warm. In 2006, a television documentary claimed that they ate people they believed to be witches.

“It’s all a bit of a mystery,” warns Gimlette. “Stories of their cannibalism have been exaggerated in a bid to boost their appeal to mawkish tourists.”